Posts tagged with "electric-vehicle"
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Taking Care Of Rechargeable Batteries
For all the great things that are talked about Li-ion batteries, I do not have a good feeling about them. I agree they are much lighter than lead acid batteries and can probably handle more current. But I always felt the maintenance and life of these batteries is far worse than traditional batteries. Take the case of phones or laptops. In spite of taking great care, they generally don’t last as long. Most of my phone batteries show lowered performance after 3 years and very poor performance after 5 years. I am sometimes left with swollen batteries. And to think we are using Li-ion batteries in EVs. I wonder how long they will really last when the environment they operate in is much harsher when compared to laptops and phones.
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Should I Buy A Low Speed Electric Scooter?
Hopefully this is the last post in the series of articles I have been writing on my quest for switching over to electric vehicle from a gasoline one. In the last post, I did a cost analysis of petrol vs electric scooter and with those calculations it did not make a lot of sense to buy an electric scooter. So the next thing I wanted to research was a cheaper low speed electric scooter. The one I was looking to research was Hero Electric Optima CX. It has a claimed range of 80 KMs and a top speed of 45 kmph. That speed may be reasonable for local driving which is pretty much what we use our gasoline scooter for.
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Gasoline vs Electric Scooter Ownership Cost
If you have been following my last few posts, you might know that I have established that an electric car is probably not the right choice for us. First, it is not cost effective because we drive so little and the cost of ownership is cheaper with gasoline car if we drive anything less than 10,000 KMs/year. Second, during the odd times that we have to travel on long trips, an electric car fails to meet our requirements because of lack of proper infrastructure as of now. The alternative is to keep our old gasoline car and instead swap out our gasoline scooter with an electric one. Now, does it make financial sense to do it? Lets find out.
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My Case Against Electric Cars
In a previous post I mentioned how it did not make financial sense to buy an EV for my use case even with all the government incentives. In this article I will explain what other factors affected my decision to buy an electric car. Before I begin, I want to mention that like most things in life, some decisions are very subjective and personal. Take the case of home ownership. Some prefer to own a house and settle in one place. Others prefer the flexibility of moving around and not having to worry about repairs and general maintenance of the house. We all know which makes more financial sense, still we might prefer one over the other purely because of our personal taste.
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Gasoline vs Electric Car Ownership Cost
The car that we currently own was manufactured in 2007 which we purchased in 2011 as an used car. It is now almost 15 years old. The time has come for re-registration. So I was wondering if I should go for the fitness test and get it renewed for another 5 years or if I should simply sell or exchange for a new car. Seeing how there is a lot of excitement in the electric car arena, I was wondering if I should go for it. Although battery EVs are sold on the premise that they save environment I don’t really buy that. No one really knows how much pollution is generated to build the car batteries. Excavating all the rare minerals, transporting and manufacturing of the batteries might cause a lot of pollution. It may not be CO2, it could be some other pollution we just don’t know yet and they still could be as harmful or more harmful than the green house gases. And lets not forget the human rights violation and child labor involved in excavating some of the rare minerals.
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